A 25-gallon oak barrel sits upright on a pallet among hundreds of others in a former furniture factory in Hammond, Indiana.
Drew Fox lays it on its side, yanks out the bung, and inserts a long, copper whiskey thief into its depths. From that he drains a luminous, tobacco-colored liquid into a pair of juice glasses and hands me one. We swirl, sniff, and take a snort.
A jolt runs down the back of my legs and my eyes roll back, as waves of warm dark cherries, maple syrup, and figs wash across my tongue.
“Wow,” he whispers.
“Yeah, wow!” I blurt.
I wasn’t sure I’d get anything from it but a 110-proof, barrel-strength tongue lashing—my papillae were still buzzing from the mushroom-citrus-curry-infused amaro I’d just sampled from a 55-gallon stainless steel barrel a few minutes earlier. But this whiskey tasted richer, more layered, and a lot older than its three-plus years on heavily charred oak would indicate. Fox had managed to transfigure malted rye, barley, and 78 percent native Indiana white corn into a spirit that briefly took over my controls like a body snatcher.
Fox is famous for brewing beer. He’s not just a pioneer of Chicago’s craft brewing industry, but his 18th Street Brewery—which was born in a shed in his Gary backyard in 2008—is widely regarded among beer nerds as one of the best in the world.
He’s not as famous for his whiskeys, but for the past five years he’s distilled, aged, and bottled a dozen of them in downtown Hammond out of the same 37,000-square-foot building where he runs the brewery and its brewpub. That’s just down the block from his 8,000-square-foot Fermentorium warehouse, special events space, and Airbnb. There are a dozen more different whiskeys still aging in their barrels there.
When Fox launched his distillery and tasting room, it was the first of its kind in northern Indiana since Prohibition doomed the Hammond Distilling Co., exactly 100 years earlier. Back then it was one of the largest producers of alcohol—particularly whiskey—in the country.
Fox has no intention of scaling up to that size, but his passion is in fact in bourbon, rye, and single malt brown spirits, even though the distillery’s profile has included gin, rum, vodka, bottled cocktails, hard seltzers, and, during COVID, hand sanitizer.
But his latest release is a liqueur called Fernet Fungo: a bitter, savory, head-spinning shitake mushroom–infused amaro he’s bottling in collaboration with Mike Bancroft of Edgewater’s Co-op Sauce, and Sauce and Bread Kitchen.
Diversification is what led Fox to become one of the very few Black distillery owners in the country—and the only one in Indiana. In 2014, when he moved 18th Street Brewery from Gary to Hammond, his beers were continuing to rack up awards, but he had an inkling the ongoing craft brewing boom wasn’t sustainable. He was also burning out on the punishing travel schedule that took him and his beers around the world, but kept him away from his kids for some 70 to 90 days in a year.
“I wanted to not be so dependent on beer,” he says. “But also do something that was
special to me.”
18th Street Distillery
5417 Oakley Ave. #1, Hammond, Indiana
(219) 937-6103
18thstreetdistillery.com
Fox was raised in Humboldt Park by his Mississippi-born grandparents. His grandmother baked pies and cakes for their west-side Baptist church, while his whiskey-loving grandfather worked as a bricklayer.
“There was a bar at the corner of North and Maplewood: Tip Top Tap,” says Fox. “They had package goods in the front bar, and pool tables, dope, and hookers in the back. Every Friday my grandad got off—that was the only time he could drink—he’d go and get shitfaced, and the bartender would call my grandmother, ‘Hey, can you come get Mr. Fox?’ She’d send me and my cousin Terrance to go pick them up. I’d see these guys talking shit in the bar and drinking whiskey. And I loved that.”
When Fox came of age, working in food and beverage at a succession of high-end hotels around town, he became a whiskey guy too. “I loved Jack Daniel’s,” he says. “It wasn’t until I got older that I looked at whiskey as something sophisticated. I served a ton of whiskey when I worked in four- and five-star hotels. I knew it was something that brought people together.”
But beer came first. It was on a trip to Belgium that he discovered and fell in love with Belgian beer—beer he couldn’t stock in the Swissotel lobby bar he was managing. This led to his first home brewing experiments, and then volunteering at the fledgling Pipeworks Brewing Co., before he was hired on as its first full-time employee.
In 2013, the year RateBeer declared Pipeworks the best new brewery in the world, Fox launched a Kickstarter for his own brewery in Gary, and it took off like a rocket. In 2014, the year RateBeer deemed him the best new brewer in Indiana, he bought the building in Hammond and moved his brewing operations there. More awards, collaborations, and world travel ensued, and though he hates the word “empire,” he started building something that looks a lot like one that includes a taproom in Gary, a now-shuttered one in Indianapolis, and a separate sour beer brewery (also now closed).
“The craft beer boom was really on fire, but I was one of those guys that looked at, ‘How can you diversify what you have and not be a one-trick pony?’ Be something that’s sustainable. I grew up extremely poor. My mom worked three overnight factory jobs, so we didn’t have a lot. I knew that you got to put something away for that rainy day.”
Fox had conducted home distilling projects on his own, and he attended a six-day hands-on course at Moonshine University in Kentucky. In 2015, he distilled his first rye with his friend Bill Welter at Journeyman Distillery, in Three Oaks, Michigan, and began aging it in charred oak barrels in advance of opening 18th Street Distillery.
It’s easy enough for new craft distillers to get unaged spirits like vodka, gin, or moonshine into bottles in order to start making money right away. Fewer are able to get out of the gates right away with an aged whiskey. But with beer paying the bills, he was able to launch with all of them, plus rum, and that 19-month-old rye. Five months later he released his first bourbon, Spirit Thief, along with another rye under the same label.
“We don’t have the same climate as Kentucky,” he says. “And one thing I learned in school is you want to get those barrels to expand as quickly as possible to draw off as much of the wood sugars as possible—and also color. So we may have a barrel on what we call the ‘hot side.’ There’s about 8,000 square feet of space up there, and in the summer it cycles up to 110 degrees. I knew I was gonna get some quick expansion on those barrels. Some of those early whiskies were just rich and sweet. Young, not in flavor profile, but young whiskies that drank like three-year-old whiskies.”
Over the years he’s won more than 20 medals in contests like the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and the American Distilling Institute’s Craft Spirits Awards. For his mash bills, he uses grains from Sugar Creek Malt Co. in Lebanon, Indiana. Despite the many variables that go into making a whiskey, he thinks the distinct qualities of these heirloom corn varieties show up in the bottle, particularly with many of his “experimental” whiskies, like the single-barrel three-year-old bourbon I tried in his second-floor hot side.
He expects to release less than a dozen cases of that under the Spirit Thief label in December, but not before another single malt near the end of November. A 122-proof whiskey he distilled from Pipeworks’s Abduction imperial stout drops this week.
You can find 18th Street Distillery spirits behind the bars at Bronzeville Winery, Jade Court, the Green Lady, the Green Room, the Map Room, and the Skylark. You can buy bottles at Bitter Pops, Bottles and Cans, and Kimbark Beverage Shoppe, but most of his small-batch special releases can only be found at the distillery.
There are bigger projects afoot too. He plans to open another distillery in Indianapolis replacing his closed taproom there, and next spring, he’s launching a separate spirit brand named after the Hammond Distilling Co., whose trademark he purchased last year.
But he sounds most excited about the collaboration he started with Bancroft, who rivals Fox for the sheer multitude of projects he has going at any given time.
The two met when Bancroft hosted a number of beer dinners with Pipeworks in its early years. Today he carries Fox’s beers and spirits at Sauce and Bread Kitchen, and Fox, who handles his own spirit distribution in Chicago, often swings by the cafe.
Sauce and Bread Kitchen
6338 N. Clark
(773) 942-6384
sauceandbread.com
One day last winter, Fox dropped in and Bancroft invited him to sample something he’d been working on.
“I’m a big amaro fan,” says Bancroft. “The more bitter, the more better. I also like cocktails that have savory hits. So I just was looking for something that could give some foundation to cocktails.” Bancroft macerated some shitakes he had leftover from one of his Supper Club dinners in neutral grain spirits, along with an abundance of lemon and orange zest from his partner Anne Kostroski’s pastry work. To that he added toasted cumin, fenugreek, nigella, cinnamon, fennel, bay leaf, and mustard seed, all in tribute to the veritable spice bazaar of nearby Devon Avenue. Molasses balanced the bitterness, and smoked salt added a savory element.
Fox was impressed. “He said, ‘I want you to try this thing I’m working on. It’s really weird,’” he says. “And from the first spoon I was like, ‘Dude, you really got something here. Let me make this for you. Let me put this in a bottle. This story needs to be told. This will rival any fucking fernet that’s out there right now.’ This is the type of stuff that drives me.”
Bancroft dropped off a bottle of Fernet Fungo for me a few weeks ago, with lovely artwork depicting an imagined landscape of the bridges between Hammond and Rogers Park. Every time I taste it, I pick up something different: an earthy fungal nose, followed by a punch of bitterness, salt, warm molasses, baking spices, and a lingering finish of curry. It’s challenging for sure, but it grows on you, particularly if you start off incorporating it into a Black Manhattan, or a “Shrooma Libre” with Mexican Coke.
Fox and Bancroft have other spirits in the works. A coffee fernet made in collaboration with Dark Matter Coffee; another amaro made with Indiana persimmons; and a riff on Aperol they’re tentatively calling Apersoul, with blood orange, rhubarb, ginger, and gentian. They expect to release that in February or March, just in time for spring cocktail season. For now you can find Fernet Fungo behind the bar at 18th Street Distillery, Sauce and Bread Kitchen, Avec, and the Long Room.
But Fox sees bigger things ahead for the fernet. “I’m a big fan of an Old Style and a shot of Malort,” he says. “But I would love to see this be the next Chicago Handshake.”
On November 13, Fox and Bancroft are popping up at the Long Room, serving New Orleans–style yakamein, and fried oyster mushrooms and chicken thighs, plus Fernet Fungo cocktails and shot specials. And December 11, he’ll be at Ludlow Liquors for Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up.